


Fergasm

by dollarpound



Category: Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Red Dwarf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-05
Updated: 2016-12-05
Packaged: 2018-09-06 16:55:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8761387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollarpound/pseuds/dollarpound
Summary: Lister has an episode during the episode Epideme when he becomes a starbug voyeur, spying on his crewmates as they await his awakening...





	

Kristine Kochanski was beside herself as she sat beside an alternative reality version of her boyfriend whose arm she’d just sawn off. She remembered her Dave, back on the Dwarf, singing these awful naive heartfelt songs to her. He used to really love his guitar back before he’d grown up, like this Dave hadn’t... whose arm she’d just sawed off... who still really loved his guitar. Surviving your own death had such a profound affect on people. It had blown her mind when Lister told her about Rimmer. She remembered him as a snivelling little smegball, but the Rimmer in this dimension had gone on to become this mythical hero type and had spent hundreds of years in prison and played the role of a snivelling smegball, sacrificing his happiness for the good of the crew. 

Lister felt himself hover slightly, lost the pressure of his body against the comfortable medibed for brief intermittent moments. He felt empty and wondered if this was what his ex-crewmate Arnold Judas Rimmer felt like as a Hologram. Then he found himself thinking about the tiny electronic lozenge encased in light that somehow collected together a surface and a shape. That you knew as Rimmer, or Rimmeeer as he preferred to be called, anything but RIMmer. But what was it like to be him, to be dead and then again a total loss of any solid sense of gravity, but at the same time he couldn’t move, was he... dying? Kochanski, he tried to look into her soul which was like a light bee buried somewhere in the infinite translucence of her eyes except a strand of hair bobbed frustratingly in a really cool way as she pensively tapped the walky talky she had linked to Kryten.

But where was the Cat. Lister was starting to levitate for longer and longer stretches above his body. Lister had had space mumps, solid hallucinations, had had his appendix out twice, had had some really weird illnesses, he’d even had positive viruses, like luck. But this was weird as luck to say the least. Lister had been talking to his virus, bargaining with it, trying to outwit it, and now it finally seemed to have shut up, but they must have given him some heavy smeg to deal with the amputation because right now he was staring down at his body, lying on the medibed, with Kochanski by his side, tapping, hair bobbing. He wondered why she was looking so pensive. Lister still felt as though he had two arms but couldn’t particularly move. But he could now see at this height that his left arm was reduced to a stump. Fortunately he didn’t take into account the mirror effect that this was actually his right.

Lister was literally hung-over. Kochanski looked up, stretched her shoulders back and sighed. As the hair strands settled back he drank in a good look at her breasts ensconced in shiny tight red PVC and drifted down the corridor. The Cat was wearing a mankini. It was not a catkini. Cat was a cat but he was also a man, like Lister and Kryten. Being a man was one of the two main genders. Gender had become a two-horse race since the conservative reformation in the 22nd century, and like a US presidential election, almost everyone just picked the one they hated least or were born into. Cat was admiring himself in the huge curved glass of the Starbug cockpit’s vacuum-shield which held at bay the deathly howling nothing of space. Cat was in a double bubble. The sequins adorning his shapely package twinkled in the Plexiglas and the stars embedded in the velvet black loneliness winked back coquettishly. But all of this was inside Cat’s bubble. The bubble of sexy-coolness that no-one could disturb.

The Cat was cut. Lister felt strange on the inside of Cat’s bubble but he was so beautiful he couldn’t resist lingering as Cat worked various unguents and creams into different regions of his body. He would flex and stretch as he did this, enjoying the smell and feel of his body as Lister enjoyed the way it shone, the way different muscle groups would contort the reflected star fields across his smooth dark skin as he twisted this way and that. Fabrics were swirled into a nest beneath him. He’d been here for hours, feeling their textures against his skin, trying on various combinations. Since they lost Red Dwarf he had been really aware that Cat needed lots of space and time to maintain himself. He was good at this, at caring for himself and Lister realised that in a sense his old friend was the least selfish among them because he took complete responsibility for himself and never burdened anyone. Seeing Cat like this he realised how needy and naggy and incomplete humans must seem from his perspective.

Lister drifted through the huge door to the cockpit but not before drinking in a good look at his friend’s shapely brown bottom. He drifted over the glowing green table in the midsection and then levitated up into the laundry room where Kryten sat glumly confronting an anatomy skeleton.

‘Well, then what have you got to say for yourself?’ asked Kryten.

‘Balls!’ said the skeleton.

‘Balls? I don’t have any balls, sir...’

‘Balls! Me neither. I’m all bones and circuit boards.’

‘What kind of balls would you like?’

‘A man’s balls!’

‘Gosh, a man’s balls I see. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to help.’

‘Balls!’

Lister wondered what the hell was going on. Then he realised how Kochanski had usurped him time and again when he had tried to look after Lister. Kryten was desperate for a male in his life to look after and patching some rusty personality boards from his brother Able’s ship into a basic robotics package controlling an anatomy skeleton was the best he could do. He felt sorry for Kryten but understood why Kochanski went crazy at him. He had just turned into a total misogynist, ignoring the careful fictions of gender that need to be ironically acknowledged, mocking the performance she made called ‘being a woman’ as if it was just some wilful eccentricity and not something we’re all born into. His behaviour seemed to imply that because he wasn’t attracted to her he needn’t be nice to her which was gross. But now Lister could see how confusing this all was for Kryten, that circumstances had wrenched him from his man’s man’s world. 

‘What’s your name, sir?’

‘Geoff Peterson, sir. What’s yours?’ 

‘Kryten.’ Lister had a friend called Peterson once.

‘Balls.’

‘I do wish you’d stop saying that.’

Lister dipped back into the midsection and fluttered off down the corridor to the medibay where his body lay recuperating from the epideme virus and Kochanski sat with her walky talky. ‘Psst!’ came a voice in a charismatic stage whisper. Kochanski leant forward and to the side and her breasts went everywhere. She froze. ‘What?’

‘I said,’ said the voice ‘Psst! P-S-S-T. Pss. T-. What part of psst don’t you understand?’ The voice was exasperated and Scottish and male. Kochanski slowly raised herself but keeping her hands awkwardly gripped to the medibed. ‘So you want me to come over there?’

‘Yes, that’s why people usually psst isn’t it?’ 

Kochanski walked slowly over to the doorway and peered left where the voice was coming from. Holding shut a door that seemed to be rattling and vibrating was a very handsome and sexy older Scottish man. He was so gorgeous and big and barelly and twinkly. ‘It’s the skutters, they’re going crazy...’

‘Skutters? We don’t have any skutters.’

‘Don’t have any skutters?’ Beaks and claws of these low-grade robotic assistants peeped through the gap in the door. ‘So I’ll just let this door open and all the skutters you don’t have can just go crazy over the whole ship shall I?’

‘What? Where did they come from?’

‘Well, Krissy, when a male skutter loves a female skutter very much...’ His fingers slipped and a skutter went flying off down the corridor. ‘Damn.’

‘Skutters don’t have genders.’

‘That’s what the crew thought too until they went to a gender-reversed parallel universe and found their skutters were female and that they could reproduce with our male skutters. Fuck knows how. The crew realised the implications and hid any female offspring in this Starbug’s engine rooms. However at least one skutter from this universe must have survived the pod crash of Burchill’s ship and snuck on board because they breed like wildfire. I’ve been keeping them at bay with John Wayne movies but I’ve run out. They love camp entertainment. When they get bored they fuck like crazy and there’s hardly any room left for them all.’

‘Wait, who are you?’

cCO

Cat was alone in the cockpit, but the Cat was never alone, because he was always alone, because he never got lonely. The Cat was just the Cat. He was self sufficient. He was listening to Lister’s remix of Robert Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the one he made by accident when he found a twisted cassette tape of it. The strange sounds washed over him as he simultaneously admired his reflection in the perfectly polished Plexiglas screen of the ‘bug and scanned the starscapes beyond. The Cat was a space-cat. He was born in space, spent his entire life on space-ships and so had his entire species. His kind had evolved in space and he had the edge over even Kristine Kochanski, the ship’s navigation officer, who knew all the right lingo but couldn’t feel in her bones the perils and energies out there beyond his giant distorted face, the furry dice, the potato timer.

Lister watched as the Cat leaned forward and peered into the inscrutable nothingness. His back muscles flexed as a split-second before you’d know anything was coming, the craft just wobbled right and some life-form or something swished within a mm of the vacuumshield. His back muscles rippled as the craft gracefully turned 180 to face... a pantomime horse with big cartoon eyelashes and lipstick, just floating there.

‘You’re pretty,’ said the Cat. Cat enjoyed playing the Riviera Kid in the AR action game ‘Streets of Laredo’ and wanted to ride a horse in real life. He put a lock on the horse and began finding something a bit more modest to wear to get Kryten.

cCO

‘I’m Lister’s confidence...’ His voice was spellbindingly beautiful, the room was just stunned by the elegance of the three words he’d said. There was a huge crowd of skutters desperate for camp light entertainment. Plus Kryten, Cat, a wax-droid pantomime horse and a gay skeleton robot called Geoff Peterson.

Kochanski was serious. ‘So you’re a solid hallucination...’ 

‘No-no. I wouldn’t say solid exactly...’ he took a theatrical look at her smooth pale thigh emerging from the sparkly red dress she wore.

‘Yep, you’re Lister’s confidence all right.’

The skutters squeaked and snapped their claws en masse and the strange machinic noise echoed around the vast engine room which had been dressed as a late-night American chat-show, an ersatz bachelor apartment with views across LA, studio lights etc just to distract the skutters from their insane transdimensional breeding style. Even Kryten chuckled a little, and felt differently about Kochanski in this new light. Lister’s annoying interest in women was something they had in common. He liked being in an audience. TV was therapeutic.

‘Sorry, I’m such a creep!’

‘If Lister’s hallucinating then we must have failed. The epideme virus must have survived.’

‘No. I survived. Lister must have told you the story, of how I took my space helmet off and exploded. Well, I didn’t. I used special affects to make it look like I’d exploded. Since then I’ve been hiding out. When the crew lost the Dwarf and went into stasis I clung to the side of the stasis booths to slow down my aging. During this time I developed a Scottish accent and changed my name to Craig.’

‘Why Craig?’

‘Dave always liked the name Craig. But enough about me: look at yoooou! Don’t you look gorgeous with your... leg... your whole leg.’ Kochanski melted. Even liquid would melt in this scenario. She gave a look that Lister wanted her to give him. A peeved ‘give me a break’ look but not the one that she gave him. The one she gave him translated as a peeved give me a break, but the one she was giving Lister’s incarnate confidence was more of a peeved give me a break and maybe we can have sex later. He was so twinkly and smouldering. You could see her whole leg. You could see where it became her body.

‘Gosh you are dishy,’ she said, objectifying him back. A roaring squeaking, clackerty-clacking went up from the crowd. The skutters adored Craig. He had this barrel-chested, manly, rat-pack, cowboy male-ness that for some weird reason they’d been programmed to respond to.

‘No-no-no,’ he boomed ‘I’m just an old hallucinatory symptom living out his days with his wax-droid pantomime horse, gay skeleton robot and skutter groupies for company.’

‘Balls!’ said Geoff.

‘What’s that, Geoff?’

‘Balls!’

‘I see. So you’re a space adventurer from another dimension!’ he said turning his attention back to Kochanski. He kind of pursed to the corners of his lips and smouldered a little to get her attention. ‘You must have some amazing stories to tell...’

‘Stories to tell?’

‘Yes, stories to tell, you must have some stories to tell, don’t ya? Okay, so where’re you from?’

‘The Gorbals.’

‘The Gorbals, indeed. Well, who would have thought I’d end up being allowed to talk to a gorgeous creature from the Gorbals. From my humble beginnings as a working class physical hallucination I’d one day meet a classy lady...’

‘A classy lady,’ Kochanski giggled.

‘Are you mocking me?’ Craig suddenly exploded with mock rage.

‘A classy lady from the Gorbals. You ever been to the Gorbals, Geoff?’ He said this in such a relaxed way, as if this was his everyday day life, sitting behind a desk in a fake bachelor pad on a spaceship, riffing with gorgeous women and skeletal robots. 

‘Sure.’

Geoff was so relaxed and normal for a skeleton that Craig began cracking up and going red at the madness of it all.

‘You have, you’ve been?’

‘I’ve got a little place there...’ This made Kochanski giggle and set up an infectious collective giggle across the room.

‘You’ve got a place there!?’ Each time the calm American robot said something Craig would just explode back. ‘What do you do there?’

‘Well we throw beads and go fishing.’ This just killed the skutters. Throw beads and go fishing? Where the hell did he get this stuff? The Cat and Kryten high fived. As the laughter died down you could see Kochanski on the monitors hanging above the audience, looking beautiful as she gently shook her head and mouthed the word ‘fishing’.

‘So...’ There was an awkward pause. ‘What’s your favourite food?’

She gave him another sarcastic look, then answered ‘Mimosian stew.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a stew.’

This exchange was just so dumb it was genius. The skutters reached fever pitch. Kryten didn’t even find things funny but this was splitting his sides.

‘Hey, that’s my line!’ heckled the Cat.

‘Your line? What is it?’ asked Craig.

‘It’s a stew,’ said Kochanski, and the whole place erupted again. Craig was red-faced, pleading and begging, he’d completely lost control. He was so silly. When he’d finally recovered he tried his original line of questioning.

‘You know what would really make this show complete. If a gorgeous sparkly red woman told an amazing anecdote about her adventures in space. A gorgeous sparkly red stew-eating woman from the Gorbles.’

‘Well there was the time we met The Inquisitor...’

‘The Inquisitor, aye?’ said Craig, camply raising the ante.

‘The Inquisitor was a droid-‘

‘Was he hot?’ said Geoff. Kryten felt included to have a joke pertaining to machinosexuality.

‘He looked a bit like you!’ said Kochanski.

‘Are you saying I’m not hot?’ said Geoff.

‘A bit bony for me...’

‘I’m bony for The Inquisitor.’ Craig was cracking up and something about him cracking up made everyone crack up.

‘He had a kind of bony face like you. And a cloak and a special glove.’

‘He had a cloak and a special glove?’ drooled Geoff.

Craig was whimpering and trying to recover his poise. ‘So who was the Inquisitor?’

‘The Inquisitor was a droid who’d survived to the end of time and decided to build a time machine and judge everyone in the Universe, erasing from existence all those he judged unworthy of existence and replacing them with potential lives that had never lived.’

Craig’s considerable eyebrows shot up as he lowered his jaw and widened his eyes with a serious look on his face. ‘And he judged you all worthy.’

‘He judged all of us worthy. Actually you are judged by yourself in the end but the crew are all really well balanced and have made the best of our situation and carry a certain amount of self-worth that carried us through.’

‘Do you like my horse?’ said Craig suddenly, feeling like they were heading towards a cul-de-sac of dullness.

‘What’s he called?’ asked Kochanski, beaming.

‘You know you have an amazing smile, you light up like a pinball machine.’

‘Mmm, I loves me a pinball machine...’ said Geoff. Kryten loved it.

‘Secretariat,’ said Craig.

‘Is he named after the race-horse?’

‘No, it’s just a coincidence,’ Craig barked manlyly.

‘I had a pony called Trumper when I was a little girl.’

‘Named after the president?’

‘No he was from a rescue home, he had terminal flatulence.’

‘I had terminal flatulence once,’ said Geoff. This got a big woof. It’s nice having a dead guy around again, thought Dave.

‘I got that out of the way,’ he added.

‘Yeah along with most of your body. Sorry that was a bit macabre. Did anything macabre happen to you during your space voyages in another dimension?’

‘Well there were these rillyrilly gross deformed skeletons we found on a research station that contained a machine that could reprogram your DNA.’

‘And Dave got turned into a chicken! I remember that! I’ve been hiding all these years watching. That was a highlight of the series!’ Craig’s face was concertinered with astonishment and mirth.

‘Oh, that’s what happened in this dimension...’ said Kochanski as the pennycent dropped.

‘Why what happened in yours? Cat get turned into a... pinball machine?’

‘Hubba-hubba,’ said Geoff.

‘We ran some safety checks and then looked at the skeletons and decided not to smeg with the DNA machine.’

‘Jeez, what a buzz kill,’ said Geoff.

‘But wait amazing stuff happened like... adventures!’ she said swirling her hands around to demonstrate. ‘Like, like, when Kryten was developing polaroids!’ Craig suddenly looked shocked and looked at Kryten who looked shocked.

‘Don’t talk about that!’ said Craig in a high-pitched exasperated husk.

‘Talk about what?’

‘About Mimosian stew!’ he strangulated.

‘What is it?’ the Cat chipped in enthusiastically and then everyone said in unison with the skutters all squeaking at full pitch ‘It’s a stew!’ as if it was an immortal catchphrase.

‘Why can’t I talk about the time Kryten was developing polaroids and the developing fluid mutated so when we tried it with a slide of a skiing holiday we could actually have a snowball fight with the people in the photo!’

‘And Dave went back into the past and made himself rich and made that giant statue of himself pissing champagne into a courtyard?’

‘My Dave was never the materialistic type.’

‘Boring!’ said Geoff.

‘You’re right my adventures are boring, how are we going to entertain the skutters now.’ But the skutters were transfixed by the manly boyishness of Craig and the way his confidence just beamed out of the creases in his lantern jawed face. In the twinkle of his eyes and the generosity of his chest and smile, in the bulge in his trousers was the promise of infinite pleasure and ease. The sexy circuits of the skutters started to shiver in their casings. 

‘You’ve had amazing adventures. Like when you went on a fairground ride designed by Kryten based on Arnold J Rimmer’s life complete with singing mini-rimmer munchkins.’

‘That was ridiculous!’ she said giving him some pinball.

‘Or when you and Cat bargained with a deadly simulant disguised as GELFs.’

‘True.’

‘Or when you... cut Dave’s arm off.’

‘Okay I get it so you’re saying that I’m having a lot more fun in this dimension.’

The skutters couldn’t take it any longer. A fire burst out from the back of the engine room as their circuitry erupted at the rush of pleasure his assured charisma gave them. Take me, Craig! their circuits sang as they arched their articulated necks back and all their joints snapped as they transcended the pleasure quotients they had been designed to withstand. Wires spooled across the floor as the smell of melting plastic and burnt metal filled the sensors of the skutters who were just coming up on this riding tide of machinic collective orgasm, adding a note of death drive lust that pushed them over the edge. Geoff’s arms were held up and shaking around as Kryten worried his head would explode yet again. A lava flow of melted skutters began to coat the stage like batter in a frying pan and Kochanski mewed and lifted her high heeled shoes and disturbed the glittering curtain of her dress, revealing the graphic harpoon scar on her thigh and catching Craig’s eye as the set caught fire and a sweltering wave of fried metal and orgasmic metallic juices inundated the whole scene.

‘And when did you meet a waxdroid pantomime horse and a dead gay skeleton robot before...’ continued Craig as he offered his hand theatrically so she could climb onto the desk.

‘Like I said you’re Dave’s confidence alright. That’s your whole ruse right, that I should be with this Dave because you think Dave’s great because you’re Dave’s confidence.’

‘Am I though? Am I? Or am I Epideme messing with Dave’s head again?’ Lister froze as he floated like an iceberg as Craig’s head began to spin and his arms started doing this weird dance where all his joints bent both ways and he began laughing maniacally, cruelly. And then Cat, Kryten, Geoff Peterson, Kochanski and Secretariat were all melted by a molten tidal wave of skuttercum.

cCO

The crew had recently met the English journalist Julie Burchill and Lister was thinking about her now as he lay there recovering from the amputation. She had said many strange things to Lister. One was she asked if he was in love with Rimmer. It didn’t make sense, he wasn’t gay, at least not in this dimension, but Burchill said this didn’t matter, as she also wasn’t gay but had had a relationship with a woman called Charlotte Raven in the 1990s. Lister tried to feel his right arm but he couldn’t feel it. He tried his left and couldn’t feel that. He couldn’t feel or see or sense anything. Then a faint light.

The faint light grew into a strong light and from the light the image of Julie Burchill dressed as the Good Witch, sort of like the fairy atop a Christmas tree but Julie Burchill and the outfit pink, emerged into the super saturated foreground twinkling light that twinkled like beads of sea water off Rimmers sunburnt chest on a Fiji beach, that his eyes drank in like mango juice. The sweet light. The Good Witch spoke in a kind of cloying speeded up ultra sweet voice:

‘If you are truly wild at heart, you’ll fight for your dreams... Don’t turn away from love, Sailor... Don’t turn away from love... Don’t turn away from love.’

Then he saw Kochanski. She picked up her walky-talky and said two words. He’s awake.

**Author's Note:**

> cCO
> 
> [the penultimate paragraph is from the movie Wild at Heart]


End file.
